The process of applying for credit or liability products usually begins with an applicant requesting either credit or liability products; and in the case of credit requests, usually the applicant requests credit on a single credit product. As used herein, an applicant can be either an existing customer or a potential customer, and can be either an individual, several individuals or an entity, such as a corporation, partnership or association. In any case, applicant merely refers to an individual(s) or entity submitting an application to a financial institution for credit or liability products. When an applicant enters a financial institution to apply for some credit or liability product offered by the financial institution, the local branch representative (LBR) requires the applicant to fill out an application and then typically forwards the application to a back office, where the application is reviewed to determine whether or not to extend the requested credit or to open the requested liability account.
Most financial institutions apply some criteria to determine whether the applicant is credit worthy for the particular credit product requested, and some financial institutions apply some criteria to determine which requests to open a demand deposit account (a bank liability) should be allowed. Usually the differentiation of criteria for each product is based on risk and acceptable levels of losses.
Unfortunately, a large segment of the population may fail this initial screening criteria for one reason or another. To make matters worse, the LBR cannot immediately differentiate credit worthy applicants from the rest. This requires the LBR to spend a substantial amount of time with some applicants, only to ultimately determine that they do not meet the financial institution's criteria. This creates an inefficiency in the lending process; those most deserving of credit or liability products must wait longer to obtain the desired product while the LBR spends extensive sales time on all applicants, some of which may not qualify for any credit or liability products. These inefficiencies result in customer service dissatisfaction and higher fees for all applicants.
The present invention is therefore directed to the problem of developing a method and system for performing credit and liability reviews that: (1) identify a credit worthy applicant or provide an indication that an applicant is probably not credit worthy for the particular product being requested (thus eliminating the need to fulfill the entire sales session) to the LBR immediately at the time of the application; (2) provide systematic verification requirements; (3) provide a liability screen (demand deposit screen) for the financial institution; (4) provide pricing by tier for specified products; (5) provide an interface to service bankcard products; (6) enable maximum debt burden offer logic; and (7) provide application pending functionality.